Nathan Lynch - The Lucky Laundry

To my dearest Taz, for your relentless love and support.

For our little treasures, Zara and Jordan:

One day we will pass you the flame of Aussie democracy.

Treasure it, marvel at it, nurture it.

For it is the greatest of human inventions.

*

In memory of Joy Geary.

No one truly knows whether Pete Hoang, a professional money launderer, had enough time for his life to flash before his eyes. If he did, one things for sure: it wouldve been a wild, stop-motion replay of 38 crazy years. Gambling, girls, rented sports cars, luxury apartments, business-class travel, champagne, danger. And cash. Lots of grubby, powder-coated cash.

But the last thing the orphan-made-good saw on this earth wasnt the inside of a penthouse suite, the face of a beautiful woman or the interior of a luxury vehicle. It was a barrel of cold steel, staring him down at close range.

For a man who flitted between complimentary suites at the best casinos across the Asia-Pacific, his final resting place was ignoble: a pool of blood, a footpath, outside an apartment block in a quiet street in Croydon Park, Sydney.

Seconds before those five slugs of lead ripped his face open and tore through his slender body, Pete saw a man race from the apartment block. Hed been very careful paranoid, even in the past few weeks. Friends were worried about him. At dinner two nights earlier, he seemed distracted. The exuberant, effervescent kid who extracted himself from Vietnam at the age of 20 was not himself.

Pete had reason to be worried. He was facing federal money-laundering charges in a Victorian court. Worse still, hed lost a bag holding $1.5 million. Seized. Taken by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) at Crown Casino in Melbourne, his favourite haunt. His luck had finally run out. Pete was in deep debt and even deeper trouble. He had no one to turn to for help. The only family hed known during his life in Australia were now hunting him.

In the last 48 hours of his life, Pete was preoccupied by pings on his Phantom Secure BlackBerry phone, the encrypted device that an international organised-crime syndicate had once gifted him.

In that slow-motion millisecond, standing on a gum-pocked footpath in Dunmore Street at 1 am on a Sunday morning, he knew hed been set up.

And then, a flash...

*

Sydney Airport, 1997

The Australian immigration official smiles properly smiles and looks at Tan Minh Nguyen-Tran with a relaxed, welcoming face. Tan is super nervous, but taken aback. Immi guys arent meant to do that!

As far back as Tan can remember, people have been ruthless. Dog eat dog. Tan was raised an orphan in a small farming community in Da Nang, Vietnam. He battled his way out and made it overland to Indonesia, where he scored a new identity and a passport. In all those life-and-death adventures, across the porous borders of South-East Asia, the 20-year-old orphan has never seen a friendly person from the government. Unless they are chasing graft.

Around him, families bustle through turnstiles with piles of suitcases, laughing and joking with airport staff. Aussie accents twang across the airport PA. There is a buzz in the air.

Hi, and welcome to Australia, the official says. Can I have your passport please?

Tan slides the magic green book across the counter, calmly, just as he mentally rehearsed during the flight. He wont need his prodigious memory for this task.

Whats your full name, please?

Petrus Keyn Peten.

Date of birth?

December 7, 1975.

Nationality?

Indonesian.

The man inspects the document. Thump, thump, flip. Its stamped. Enjoy your stay.

The parentless kid from central Vietnam walks through the gates and into Australia, his new life in front of him. A different sort of sunshine fills the arrivals hall, amplified in its intensity through giant panes of glass. The mercurial kid from Da Nang is reborn: an Indonesian student in Sydney!

The giant airport clock above the baggage claim area ticks methodically as he watches his bags meander along the carousel. Come on.

Little Tan from Vietnam doesnt know it yet, but in the Lucky Country, time is going to prove more elusive than money. The second half of his life has just begun.

*

When Petrus Keyn Peten arrived in Sydney on a false student passport in 1997, he knew exactly what to do. The people whod sold it to him had told him the drill. Within a few short months he had applied for refugee status, under the name Minh Tan Nguyen.

The rootless young man began to find his feet in Sydney, a big foreign city. It was a place where anyone could make it with the right connections, a good work ethic and a little bit of street smarts. Minh had plenty of the latter two, and he knew where to find the first. He flitted between apartments, a job here and a hustle there; changed his name three more times; and within four years he could call himself a citizen. Pete Tan Hoang: Aussie.

Fourteen action-packed years later, the adventure was over.

An hour after midnight on Sunday morning, 7 September 2014, a pub-goer walked past a slight Asian bloke curled up on the footpath. When he reached the Croydon Park Hotel, he told the doorman there was a customer passed out drunk in the gutter on Dunmore Street. They might want to check on him. A few minutes later, the security staff from the hotel found Petes body, cold and without a pulse, with five bullet holes in his head, neck and left arm.

Ambulance staff raced out but could only pronounce him dead. It wasnt a difficult diagnosis. Petes face was so disfigured that the Department of Forensic Medicine, in nearby Glebe, would eventually have to identify him by his fingerprints.

He was carrying the buzzer for a rented Nissan GTX sports car. The Phantom Secure phone that Pete had used to arrange the midnight meeting was still charged and locked in his pocket. When police eventually cracked it open, they found it empty. All the data, including Petes messages with his killer, had been remotely wiped.

*

The police ordered an inquest into the killing. This was not surprising, considering Pete was facing federal money laundering charges and had extensive links to organised crime, and there was no sign of a killer. The verdict was handed down by New South Wales coroner Les Mabbutt in July 2018.

Mabbutt, a handsome 57-year-old former cop, was still haunted by his early days in the police force, when hed made death knocks to distraught families. He did a law degree by night to get away from it all. And now here he was, handing down a verdict of Homicide by unknown person or persons for the life of Pete Tan Hoang.

In this case, there was no distraught family, no crying wife, no shattered kids. No one turned up to mourn the loss of the orphan boy from Da Nang. All Les could do was refer the case to the Unsolved Homicide Squad, where it still sits unsolved today.

In reality, the only family Pete knew had been the ones who pulled the trigger. He had become just another statistic in the world of organised crime. A dispensable bagman whose life was extinguished to ensure he wouldnt rat on those at the tip of the dirty money pyramid. The last time Petes killer was spotted, he was jumping into the passenger seat of a waiting hatchback, which sped off into the inky blackness of Sydney at night.

Pete had lucked out in the great game of life. And like a roulette wheel, the game would now roll on without him.